I have some kind of 'find' function, where I select an appointment by adding it to the selectedAppointments list. Works, but Agenda does not scroll to the correct position automatically. So in some cases, the user cannot see the selected appointment.
How can I tell Agenda to scroll to the correct position?
Thank you!
There is a displayedLocalDateTime property on Agenda (or displayedCalendar if you are still using the depricated property). It will tell Agenda to show that specific moment in time, but depending on the active skin (week, day, or whatever the future will bring) that may be a different time frame.
After rereading, I noticed that you used the word "scroll" very specifically, so I checked and agenda correct shows the date based on displayedLocalDateTime, but it did not scroll to the correct time within that date. Fixed that just now.
I'm using a plain NSDatePicker control with NSYearMonthDayDatePickerElementFlag. It's the same as the date picker on the "date & time settings" panel with MM/DD/YYYY fields (the text box with 3 subfields, not the calendar portion). My users are getting stuck typing the digits into the year sub-field (though the behavior is present on the month and day fields too).
You can reproduce the problem using the Date & Time settings panel. Uncheck "Set date & time automatically" and click on the current year part of the field, 2014. Now just type 19 and pause. After about 1 second it fires some event and changes the date to 1969.
My users don't seem to type as fast as the NSDatePicker expects them to. Some event fires, calling some internal function NSDatePickerCell(NSTextFieldWithStepperDatePickerInternal)_userEditExpired:, well before many of my users can finish entering the 4 digit year. The timeout is reset after each keystroke, and seems about a second or a little less.
Does anybody know of a way to defeat that behavior without resorting to writing a whole new date picker? I'd be happy with a way to just change the timeout to something longer, maybe about 5 seconds, so the slower typists can get all 4 digits entered without the event firing and accepting their input before they're finished.
I have an NSDatePicker with an associated NSButton that changes the current date to "Today" when pressed.
However: When the date is currently January 4th, 2014, and I use the built-in arrow buttons to switch to a different month without changing the actual selected date, there seems to be no way to get the calendar to refresh. Here's a video of the issue:
Video of the Issue: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ay7fljnoyxb06ua/Calendar%20Test%20Video.mov
See the attached sample project for an example. To reproduce:
Click "Today"
Click the right-arrow button to switch to a different month (without selecting an actual day)
Click "Today"
The NSDatePicker seems to fail to refresh if you're programmatically selecting a date that is not in the currently-viewed month, and if the date that it is switching from is in a different month as well.
But, the date is properly picked. If you use the buttons to select a date, then manually browse back to the proper month, the date has been selected. But the calendar never shows you that month automatically, unless the date you're switching from is in the currently-viewed month.
Sample Project: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tnpox2mt5f5z2nb/CalendarTest.zip
I would file this as a bug against the API since there are no methods in the class that suggest you'd have to ask it to refresh manually (I'd assume setting the selected date would automatically display the proper range to show that selection).
As a work-around, you might try asking it to display ( -setNeedsDisplay:YES ) or manually twiddling its min/max range after setting the date, then setting it back to unlimited immediately after. Maybe that'll kick-start it into displaying the correct range for the selected date.
My app draws a calendar. I have an ivar, _cal, set to -[NSCalendar autoupdatingCurrentCalendar] because I'd like to redraw the calendar if the user makes a change in System Preferences. For example, they could change the first day of week from Sunday to something else.
Currently, I'm using an NSTimer that fires every second. I check [_cal firstWeekday] against a cached copy to see if it has changed. If so, I redraw.
I'm wondering if instead there is a way for me to be notified if the System Preferences affecting the calendar have changed. Then, I could get rid of my NSTimer.
It looks like you can observer NSCurrentLocaleDidChangeNotification.
See https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSLocale_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001224-DontLinkElementID_1
This is a wheel that's been re-invented again and again over the years.
The Problem: The user needs to input a Date/Time
Basic considerations
We want to make it as easy as possible for the user to enter the desired date/time
Some applications call for historical dates, some applications call for future dates only, some will need to handle both
We want to prevent the user from entering jibberish data
We want to auto-populate this control as aggressively as possible.
We want this control to be as re-usable as possible.
Popular solutions include:
Text Boxes
Combo Boxes
Pop-out calendars
Server-side and/or client-side validation
Various ways of alerting the users about bad data
There are a panoply of ready-to-eat solutions about, but I'm looking for some more general information. Have there been any usability studies done on the various date-time-control approaches? Is there a "best" date-time control out there? Are there any well-established "Dos and Don'ts"?
Related question: Best GUI control(s) to describe a time range
My preference is for a text input with an elipsis button next to it:
Enter a date [ ] [...]
The elipsis would pop up a calendar to populate the text input, but the user can type in a date if they want. Validation should be done when the "OK" button for the form is pressed - trying to do date validation on a character by character basis is doomed, in my experience.
The validation should be sophisticated and allow expressions like
"today"
"Tomorrow"
"23 Jan"
etc.
Edit: In reply to some comments, one could do validation when the text edit loses focus (though I hate that kind of thing) in which case the edit content could change from "23 Jan" to "23-01-2009" to indicate that the exprssion was understood.
Give me a calendar to select the date with a mouse. And let me type the date in with the keyboard. Accept as many formats as possible. If I need to enter December 21, 2012, let me use:
Dec 21 2012
21DEC2012
December 21 2012
12/21/2012 (or 21/12/2012, pick one, perhaps depending on what country I'm using the software in)
12212012 (same parenthetical fragment as above)
Etc.
Whatever you decide to do to solve the localization issue, make sure it's obvious what you expect. Give me an example, or a template with MMDDYYYY that I can type over.
Please don't give me pull-down boxes where I have to scroll, especially through years. If I'm old, and I'm entering my DOB, I don't have enough time left in my life to scroll down to the bottom of your pull-down box. Pull-down boxes are a good pattern to use when I don't know what the options are, but if it's something I'm very familiar with, like my birth date, then pull-down menus are a hassle.
Now, WRT time inputs (Big pet peeve), don't assume that I meant 3 am. If I enter 3 for the time, assume I meant 3 pm. Make me do extra work to schedule something at 3 am. If you're uncomfortable with assuming that much on my behalf, at least alert me that I've scheduled something for 3 am so I can fix it now instead of later when someone on my event invitation list emails and says "You moron, you scheduled our D&D Meetup for 3 am!"
I think the date range entry on Google Calendar is quite good. You can enter by keyboard or by mouse. The only quibble would be in entering dates for a different year.
You can do it easily enough via the keyboard, but they should have a second set of little arrows on the calendar to jump a year at a time back or forth using the mouse.
EDIT: In response to the question, "What if you want to schedule an event that goes from 11PM on Tuesday till 1AM on Wednesday (say a daily build, for instance)? How do you wrap the time over midnight?"
If the "to" time pushes it over midnight, then roll the "to" date to the next day. That would just be part of the business logic of the component. You'll notice in the second image above, the drop-down indicates both the end time and the duration of the event, which should be a hint.
If you try and put an end date earlier than the start date, you can highlight the background colour of the fields and/or show an error message on save.
Play around on Google Calendar and see how it behaves.
I'd suggest you also allow for users who like to type rather than click on a calendar control, so a combination of text box + popup calendar works well.
We created a custom control with just such a combination. User can type a date in a variety of formats in the textbox, or click on a button to pop up the calendar.
We allow all sorts of input like "today", "wed", or "+2" (for day after tomorrow) and use regular expressions for most of the validation client side. We also do server side validation of course.
The control also has an optional textbox for time which can be enabled or hidden by a property. We felt it was easier to separate date from time. For times, we allow "9pm", "2100", "09:00" etc.
The control caters for a min and max date, so that date of birth can have a range from say -100 years to current year, while credit card expiry might range from current year to +5 years, and so we use range validators.
A text box with an image-link to a pop-out calendar on the side is my choice. Best of both worlds.
If you want something extra you could let a natural language date/time parser like Chronic http://chronic.rubyforge.org/ spice it up.
Also don't forget the international users.
If you're going for the combo-box/list-box option make sure you make the months read "Jan","Feb"..."Dec" rather than "1","2"..."12".
It's rather annoying having to figure out which slot is the month and which is the day according to the ranges of the values.
I'd go for three alternatives depending on the situation:
2 combo boxes. One listing year + month, another the day
3 combo boxes. One listing years, one month, one days
Visible calendar/s and combos like this one from YUI
And I believe there are more options from which I'd choose.
You need to check your UI requirements. If you want script-enabled support only, they you can go with any of your panopoly of scripts and run with whatever date/time format they provide into a hidden field.
However, if you need the user entry in a textbox, then you're faced with some decisions:
Is the date/time format rigid? e.g. mm/dd/yyy hh:mm:ss format only?
Or loosely defined, to allow for the "today", "tomorrow", "23 Jan" style entries?
Will the formats be locale-specific? e.g. mm/dd/yyyy vs. dd/mm/yyyy
Validation methods depend on your decisions on requirements.
I like the jQuery date-picker plugin. It'll allow output in specific formats.
A calendar showing multiple months continuously: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/patterns/Calendar-Strip.html
I've always found Google Calendar easy to use in this respect. You could certainly do worse than trying to emulate it. The key is to give the user a lot of flexibility in how they enter information. For example, I can select a time from a drop down list or type it in manually, and when I type, I'm not required to include the colon or the "m" in "pm".
I really like the way QT4's Date/Time widget works.
You can enter dates manually (type in the date, in common formats).
You can use your scroll wheel to quickly change date/time fields.
You have an expandable calendar that has drop down months and forward/backward arrows for the months. You can click on specific days and enter the year manually, or with a combo box (scroll wheel works here too).
Here is a short video (~7.5MB) that shows how the widget works and what some of its features are: Video Here
I would expect any sophisticated application to have some or all of these features.
Being able to enter relative dates (today, last week, 3 days ago) is handy, but I'm not sure how practical it would be, given standard questions like "What is your date of birth?", or "When would you like X emailed to you?".
you can use plugin cxcalendar. It looks like other datepicker. but you can pick year and month in select after clicking year-month title.